Winning an Oscar is the easy part. Getting up onstage and delivering an acceptance speech that doesn’t burn the internet down in an inferno of furious discourse? That’s where things get tricky. Just ask Graham Moore. On 22 February 2015, the novelist and filmmaker – who hadn’t told many people about the Sunday afternoon, aged 16, when he tried to end his life – found himself telling 37 million Americans about it all at once.
It was the 87th Academy Awards, and the Los Angeles-based writer had just won Best Original Screenplay for the Benedict Cumberbatch starrer The Imitation Game. As he made his way to the stage, the then 33-year-old knew exactly what he wanted to say. “I thought, if this is going to be the only time in your life that you’re before millions and millions of people, you better say something meaningful,” explains Moore, to whom it seemed “more ethical” to deliver a message to America’s outsiders and outcasts given the subject of his film. The Imitation Game had told the tale of British mathematician Alan Turing – a man whose brilliance helped win the Second World War for the Allied forces, but whose sexuality meant he was still condemned to a brutal fate.
